Desdemona

Dess

Polymath symbol

Vital Statistics

Gender

Female

Race

Human

Faction

Midnighters

Status

Alive

Location

Bixby, Oklahoma

Hair color

dark brown

Eye color

brown (purple in bright light)

Desdemona, known as simply Dess to her fellow Midnighters, is a polymath. In the trilogy, polymaths are people who are extremely talented in math, instead of the traditional usage of the word "polymath." She uses this ability to deduce the "shape" of Midnight, and can find pockets of instability in the space-time continuum. She also is good at finding thirteen-letter words, so she is the Midnighters' main weapons maker.

Contents

Dess has dark brown hair and eyes, and olive skin. Her eyes flash purple in extreme light, and she wears sunglasses whenever she can for she has the same sensitivity to bright light that most Midnighters do.

In the beginning, Dess asks Jessica Day all these strange questions. at first, Jessica thinks Dess can read her mind and is trying to creep her out. Later, Jessica finds out about the Blue-Time and that Dess does the math, not read her mind.

Dess is shown to be friends with Rex Greene, but she despises Melissa, thinking her to be manipulative, rude, and insane. She also doesn't think highly of Jonathan Martinez, who is the acrobat.

After "borrowing" her father's GPS coordinate finder, Dess spends most of her time looking for patterns in the coordinates of the houses of the Midnighters. While looking at these patterns, she stumbles upon a strange house that is located in a theoretical "dark spot" in a mindcaster's radar. She decides to go and find out what was in the house.

There, Dess meets an old mindcaster named Madeline. Madeline tells Dess about the missing history of the Midnighters, and tells Dess about the Halfling named Aneatha who communicates between the Darklings and the Darkling Groupies. Dess tries to hide the new information from Melissa, in effort to protect Madeline from the darklings, but fails when Melissa forcefully reaches out and touches Dess, gaining access to all her secrets.